Orange France will sell Apple's iPhone to consumers who don't want to be tied to the carrier, provided they cough up €749 for the handset - €250 less than T-Mobile Germany's unlocked iPhones cost.
Orange said it will offer four iPhone-oriented price plans ranging from €49 to €119 per month. Data usage is capped at 500MB a month …

We've seen...

how popular the jesus phone is in Europe, so stop reporting on it. Honestly, somewhere someone everyday feels the need to do something to put possibly the worst phone ever made into the headlines and inflate jobs and the fanboi's egos even more. Stop doing it!

749 euro's?

and you cant even send texts to more than one recipient at once. Sod all the other features, it cant even do bog standard basic stuff.

I agrree with thecomments above; cheap contract, free phone and iPod touch for the cheaper than a N800 web browsing device with better media capability. Maybe an industrious thrid party developer will do what apple forgot to do in february and make it do the stuff that every other mobile phone on the market can do, might be worth it's price tag and crap contracts then... but i doubt it.

iPod touch

I had an iPod touch. It was fantastic. However, none of the internet features work when you step out of range if a wifi hotspot. And they aren't all that common outside of city centres. I was left with a great iPod but none of the extra functionality was useable. So I got an iPhone, where for a little extra money I can use most of the features in most places (O2's not very good coverage notwithstanding) and I don't have to worry about my mobile scratching my iPod in my pocket. I'm a very happy bunny.

It will get cheaper

Look what happened in the US, the iPhone was reduced in price by $100. The SIM free version will get cheaper as will the contract phone. In the UK, O2 and CPW will put pressure on Apple to reduce prices as sales are not as good as expected - see www.mobiletoday.co.uk for the end of the week news round-up. The iPhone, with Apple's current business model, is just over priced and most people know that. It can't be a mass market product at the moment.

Anyone watch BBC last night?

I ended up watching a bit of Watchdog, purely because when I turned on the TV I saw them saying "are Carphone Warehouse lying about the iPhone?". Unfortunately, I wasn't blessed by an article exposing how bad the phone is and how overpriced it is, or telling us that Carphone Warehouse were failing to tell customers that they could probably buy it for less in a few months anyway. It was about insurance, and once again they drew attention to "people queuing for the iPhone!" and called it the "must have gadget this Christmas". Reminded me why I don't watch that terrible programme.

On another note, who uses their phone for P2P? Surely it's not fast enough or battery saving enough to be feasible? And doing it with the shit net that the iPhone has???

Fanboys.......

I have got an N95, and do you know how many of its features I ACTUALLY use? Probably about 3, aside from standard phone calls and text messages. It was a huge mistake going for the most feature packed phone instead of sticking with the make I've always liked (Sony Ericsson).

From what I can gather (from the people I know who have "similar" phones) very few people will actually use the "additional" features of an N95 or an i-phone, so bragging about them is just pointless willy waving. And yes I am aware that is ironic considering I own one, just blame it on a moment of madness.